When you examine the ways in which humans attempt to feel more valuable and worthwhile, it becomes apparent that we really don’t understand what self-esteem is. We keep looking outside of ourselves (external esteem). This soon overshadows our own needs, desires, expectations, feelings and opinions. We become unsure of ourselves, increasingly at the mercy of, and reliant on, other people, things, and substances to make us feel ‘OK’. We don’t realise that we can’t keep going outwards and expect to feel good inwardly. How reliant we are on external factors is the degree to which we lack confidence. If 90% of our energy is going towards pleasing others in order to feel worthy, we can expect our confidence to be -90%.
Self-esteem is about the way you treat and regard yourself.
It’s the day-to-day actions and thinking, and what you carry from your experiences in the baggage for your journey, that determine whether you consider yourself to be a worthwhile and valuable person. It’s about whether you use outer references to determine your feelings and opinions of yourself, and about whether you come from a place of love, care, trust, and respect, or from fear, guilt, shame, anger, and making yourself small. Self-esteem is about whether you’re using a narrative of judgements as a reference for your present perspective, or whether you’re showing up and recognising your humanness, including how you’ve grown and who you are yet to become.
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